Very large Word files

[Bob Arco]

Hi,

Our Tech Writing group uses Word 2003, and they work with very large files.
These are scientific reports, which have to be strictly version controlled
once they are complete, and as such it is most convenient to contain the
entire report, often in the neighborhood of 500 pages with lots of embedded
charts and tables, in a single file. They are usually over 20MB.

One particular client who is very demanding and likely to insist on a single
file is currently requiring a 3000 page document, over 128MB in size, and
this is nearly impossible to work with. The tech writers can break it into
pieces for draft and review, but the final document needs to be whole, they
say.

Now they are looking at doing a study for which the report will be over 6000
pages, including embedded tables and charts, and I have no idea how they can
possibly do it. They already have the latest hardware, with maximum RAM
addressable by a 32 bit application (4MB).

Any suggestions? How do other people deal with these very large documents?
Can anyone point me to a best practices document? I can upgrade the whole
group to Word 2007 if it would help, but I don't want to do that yet unless
it will make a significant difference - the learning curve will just kill
them.

Thanks,

 

[Bob Arco]

Sorry, of course I meant 4GB of RAM, Core2Duo processors as well. Windows XP.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

You may find something that is of use to you in the following article by
fellow MVP, Daiya Mitchell:

http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Idaho Word Man]

I hope this message gets through. I keep getting a "Service Temporariliy
Unavailable" message.

I feel for you, Bob. Our tech writing group thinks 600 pages is big, but
6,000? Wow.

Does your final document need to be published as a Word file? What we do is
break "big" documents up into individual chapters or sections, and then
generate a TOC that spans all the documents. (For creating a TOC that covers
multiple documents, see
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=148 .) Then,
when we're ready to publish the final report, we create PDFs of each
section/chapter/appendix and then use Adobe to create one PDF that contains
the entire document.

For my latest big document (about 700 pages), the Word files added up to
about 80 megs, but the PDF was a little under 6 megs.

Good luck with your 6,000-page monster.

Fred

 

[Idaho Word Man]

I hope this message gets through. I keep getting a "Service Temporariliy
Unavailable" message.

I feel for you, Bob. Our tech writing group thinks 600 pages is big, but
6,000? Wow.

Does your final document need to be published as a Word file? What we do is
break "big" documents up into individual chapters or sections, and then
generate a TOC that spans all the documents. (For creating a TOC that covers
multiple documents, see
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=148 .) Then,
when we're ready to publish the final report, we create PDFs of each
section/chapter/appendix and then use Adobe to create one PDF that contains
the entire document.

For my latest big document (about 700 pages), the Word files added up to
about 80 megs, but the PDF was a little under 6 megs.

Good luck with your 6,000-page monster.

Fred

 

[Idaho Word Man]

Okay, so when it finally went through I got two copies posted. Better than
none, I guess.

I just wanted to add that we always create our TOC using the "RD fields"
described in the article I linked you to. Those flelds went at the back of
our "Front Matter" section. You need to update the RD fields whenever you
rename your chapters for a new draft. For example, in the 700-page DSA I
mentioned, the RD codes for Draft 6E looked like this: { RD
"Chapter-01_Rev6E.doc" \f }. If I updated from Draft 6E to 6F, I needed to
update the RD codes to reflect the exact file names for each document that
formed the final document.

Fred